Ep. 152 – Metabolic and Hormonal Spark: The Value of Lifestyle Shifts with Dr. Jade Teta 

I am delighted today to have Dr. Jade Teta as my guest! He is an integrative physician, author, and expert in natural health, fitness, metabolism, and self-development. He spent the last 25 years immersed in the study of strength and conditioning, hormonal metabolism, and the psychology of change and success. He recently started a new company, Next Level Human. It combines his medical and fitness knowledge with his expertise in self-development and mindset change. He writes and lectures extensively to healthcare professionals and the public about lifestyle medicine, natural health, and mindset change. 

Hormonal health and metabolic issues are an enormous pain point for many of my followers and the women in my program. Making lifestyle shifts can be very valuable in helping us develop healthy metabolic habits and easing us through the changes that both men and women tend to go through in middle age. Join us on the show today to hear Dr. Teta’s story and learn about some lifestyle changes that you can make to improve your metabolic processes and better your hormonal health.

“We cannot allow research and general rules to supersede what the individual metabolism needs and wants.”

Dr. Jade Teta

IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:

• Dr. Teta talks about his journey that began at fifteen and his pivot into the hormonal health and metabolism space.
• How females were under-represented in the research community before 2001.
• Dr. Teta discusses some of the changes that occur in women who are older than thirty-five, which made him start second-guessing his original methodology and philosophies around weight loss and nutrition.
• How estrogen and progesterone affect what Dr. Teta refers to as SHMEC (Sleep, Hunger, Mood, Energy, and Cravings).
• A simple analogy to help you understand estrogen and progesterone.
• How biofeedback signals can help you to understand your metabolism.
• Dr. Teta shares what he has found to work best for most women as a different approach to exercise.
• Why calories matter.
• Dr. Teta shares his take on eating for satiety versus eating for calories and marrying macros.
• Most people only focus on diet and exercise without accounting for stress and movement.
• Dr. Teta talks about buffer foods and trigger foods.
• Dr. Teta discusses his strategy for helping women find the diet that works best for them.
• Dr. Teta talks about intermittent fasting.

Connect with Dr. Jade Teta

On his website

On Instagram       

The Next Level Human Podcast

Connect with Cynthia Thurlow

• Follow on Twitter, Instagram & LinkedIn

• Check out Cynthia’s website

• Check Out Dry Farm Wines: www.dryfarmwines.com/cynthiathurlow

About Everyday Wellness Podcast

Welcome to the Everyday Wellness podcast with Cynthia Thurlow! Cynthia is a mom of 2 boys, wife, nurse practitioner, and intermittent fasting and nutrition expert. She has over 20 years experience in emergency medicine and cardiology, but pivoted to focus on food as medicine. She loves to share science-backed practical information to improve your overall well being and is grateful to be interviewing leaders in the health and wellness field.  Her goal with Everyday Wellness is to help her listeners make simple changes to their everyday lives that will result in improved overall wellness and long term health.   

TRANSCRIPT

Cynthia Thurlow: I am delighted and excited to have Dr. Jade Teta. He is an integrative physician, author and expert in the realm of natural health, fitness, metabolism and self-development. He spent the last 25 years immersed in the study of strength and conditioning, hormonal metabolism and the psychology of change and success. He has recently started a new company, Next Level Human, that combined his medical and fitness knowledge with his expertise and self-development and mindset change. He writes and lectures extensively on the subjects of lifestyle medicine, natural health and mindset change to both healthcare professionals and the public. So excited to reconnect with you today. We tried this a couple days ago and I had some extraneous outside noise that ensured that we had to reschedule. 

Dr. Jade Teta: I’m so happy to be here with you, Cynthia. Thank you, I’m honored to be with you. 

Cynthia Thurlow: Talk to us a little bit about how you went from your medical training, to now you are pivoted really into this hormonal health, metabolism space, and obviously, I’ve been so excited to connect with you because this is such an enormous pain point for the women that follow me and that are in my programs because I feel, as I remind people, we’re very fixated as a culture on younger individuals and being very fixated on the kind of extraneous body composition. Then, women and men too, go through these middle-aged changes that if we don’t capitalize on some of the lifestyle shifts that we need to make, it can set us up for developing some metabolic unhealthy habits and changes that head us in a direction we don’t want to be in. I’d love to hear a little bit about your journey, because I find that the stories that my guests share really give us some perspective and shine some light on why they have gotten into the specialties that they’re in. 

Dr. Jade Teta: Yeah. Well, you and I, we overlap a lot. I think we have– there’s a mutual respect there, because I think we talk a lot about the same things. Hopefully, we’ll find some places to deviate during this conversation to make it interesting. I really started out doing this, it’s very strange, at 15 years old. 

When people hear that they’re just like, “Wow, what do you mean?” Well, I started at 15. I was very much into football, and I was one of these young high school kids, I had dreams of the NFL. As purpose often does, we start with a passion. Then, that passion turns into something, which turns into something else, and our purpose starts to evolve. 

What evolved for me was, at 15, their family and their friends, or my friends rather and their family, on the football team, I was writing them programs offseason, because I was very much into this reading all these magazines and stuff and started learning about nutrition. Right away, I’m helping my friends’ moms with nutrition and writing programs and doing workout programs for them. I went to study biochemistry in undergrad because I was like, “I really want to understand how nutrition actually works,” not just nutrition at the sort of gross level, but what’s going on in our bodies. Then, I personal trained all through undergrad. 

You’ll appreciate this, I’m sure, Cynthia, many people do who are in alternative medicine space. I hit this depressing point of my life, because for whatever reason, as I’m going along, thinking, I’m going to go to medical school, and I’m applying, and I’m basically just getting ready to go to East Carolina University Medical School. I look, and I happen to look at the curriculum. I see and I’m looking, and I can’t wait to take these different courses. I don’t see one course in psychology, I don’t see one course in exercise, not one course in nutrition. I think most people for me, looking back now, I can go, wow, you were really purpose driven at a young age because this immediately sent me sort of in a depression because I was like, “Wait, this is not what I was thinking. I thought that I was going to be getting lifestyle medicine education.” I was not. It was all drugs. There’s nothing wrong with drugs and surgery, it’s just not where I wanted to focus. Those things to me, even at that time, this is going back in the early 1990s, 1992-1993 is when I graduated from high school. I was like, “This makes no sense to me.” 

It put me in a place where I actually did not go to conventional medical school and was in this place of, “What am I going to do next?” I went out to Los Angeles started working as a biochemist, thinking what am I going to do, personal training? Then, my older brother actually was finishing up his master’s and he said, “Check out this school called Bastyr University,” which is a school that trains naturopathic physicians. Now, for those of you listening, who don’t know what this is, think about your primary care physician, but they specialize in lifestyle medicine. It was exactly what I was looking for. The only problem was that my whole family and everyone I knew was like, “What are you crazy? That’s like witchcraft medicine. You don’t want to do that. What are you going to do with that? You’re not going to have any respect.” I was like, “I don’t care. I’m going in this direction. I’m going to do this and I’ll make my way now.” Now at that time, nobody thought alternative and complimentary and functional medicine and the stuff you and I do, Cynthia, that’s so popular, there’s so many people are coming to us for, would be this in demand. I had no idea. I took a huge leap, and somehow sort of got lucky along the way. 

Now, I’ll speed up this story because then fast forward into– a couple different events happened. I got this education. I was focused on nutrition and weight loss medicine right from the get-go. I saw that I was a better teacher maybe than a healer. Along the way, I had women especially begin to put me in my place. When I say put me in my place, I really mean put me in my place. Because as much as I don’t like to admit this, I was very much that stereotypical, ignorant, arrogant young man who just was like, “If you’re not eating, what I tell you to eat and you’re not exercising the way I’m telling you to exercise, you don’t push hard, then you’re just a lazy glutton.” I had no idea the differences between men and women. Sadly, neither did the research community because it wasn’t until 2001 that they actually started mandating and saying, “Hey, we’ve got a problem.” Females are underrepresented in the research, and especially females who I was training 35- to 65-year-old females. The information on their metabolism was being extrapolated from college-aged young men. I was lucky enough to have a few women that I trained, pretty much go off on me, put me in my place, and I was also lucky enough to be conscientious enough to go, “Okay. I don’t know what I’m doing. I have got to figure this out.” 

In a strange turn of events, the bald linebacker-looking dude with the strange accent [chuckles] became an expert in female hormonal metabolism. I happened to be one of the first ones to do it, and wrote books, and this launched my career into this world. In a very strange way, what started out as a passion and an interest, turned into a deep purpose and evolved into teaching in this hormonal metabolic space. 

Cynthia Thurlow: Well, there’s so much to unpack from what you just said. You were the second physician I’ve connected with this week, who mentioned that they had considered more conventional allopathic medicine and made a clear-cut decision. Same thing, we’re all about the same age. Back in the 1990s, you really weren’t seeing people that were– at least I wasn’t, and I was at a big research hospital. Certainly, you were way ahead of your time. It took me a few more years of conventional allopathic medicine. I was ER, then cardiology, and I kept seeing the same people coming back over and over and over again. My listeners know my whole story, I kept saying, “It all starts with food. We really have to focus on the food piece, I’m tired of writing prescriptions.” I’m very grateful that those women actually came to you and convinced you to consider a different methodology and philosophy. 

I retrospectively think back to when I was in my 20s, when I was a young NP, and I would see women and their early 40s and their 50s, and I was like, “What is wrong? They’re struggling to sleep, they’re struggling to lose weight, they seem very reasonable, the CICO, calories in, calories out, isn’t working for them. They’re overexercising. What is going on?” Let’s talk a little bit about what are some of the changes that occur for women north of 35. As they’re kind of heading into perimenopause, the five to seven years preceding menopause. Menopause, it’s almost a cruel twist of fate, that things really start to shift. There are many things we take for granted when we were younger. I think that’s just part of the aging process. We look back and we’re like, “Oh, I didn’t realize how easy that was.” Then retrospectively looking back and saying, “Gosh, why didn’t I pay more attention to this?” What are some of the changes that you were seeing in your female clients, and patients that were causing you to really second guess your original methodology and philosophies as they pertained to weight loss, nutrition, etc.? 

Dr. Jade Teta: Once I got put in my place, what became clear to me was that these hormonal changes that women go through, for example, I would see, even as a young man, I would see there be certain times of the month, let’s say, where the women I was training, were just killing it in the gym, and just ready to go and exercise performance and exercise recovery was on point. Then, other times, they just would not be as energetic, would not be as motivated, maybe missed their workouts. At the time, I’m just like, “What is going on? What is the problem here?” I started to understand estrogen and progesterone, and I’ll explain a little bit about these two hormones so we can get into then what happens, but I started to understand that these hormones are influencing everything in the body, so not just the uterus and ovaries and breast tissue, but also the brain, the fat tissue, the muscle tissue. There are receptors for these hormones all over the body, and they are influencing how the body responds. Perhaps most pertinently and easy for everyone to understand is they influence what I call SHMEC. This funny little acronym that I become famous for, sleep, hunger, mood, energy and cravings, S-H-M-E-C. 

Now, if your SHMEC is in check, this means you can stay on any calorie-reduced diet and you can train or you can not be a lazy glutton, let’s say, that I thought as this ignorant young man. But it SHMEC goes out of check, what this tells us is that there are certain hormones, hormones like insulin and cortisol and ghrelin and the incretins and brain chemicals like dopamine and serotonin, that are not necessarily in balance and helping you have motivation, helping you manage the stress of exercise too much or too little manage the stress of diet too much or too little. Then, estrogen and progesterone are influencing all of these hormones and having actions in and of themselves. They cycle throughout the month. Women have five different hormonal stages in their life. Men have two, that’s the first thing to sort of understand. Women have this cyclical nature of estrogen-progesterone throughout the month, men do not have this. 

The first thing I started to see was this particular aspect of things. Once I started waking up to this, I started thinking, “Well, obviously there’s something going on. What if the problem is not them? What is it that I am trying to give them the wrong system? What if I started doing things at certain times of the month, once I started understanding this? What if I started letting them take it easy, when they needed to take it easy and working with when they wanted to push hard, let them push hard?” At the time, I didn’t quite get what I was doing with follicular phase, luteal phase, and stuff like that. But I just started letting them sort of ease up. At that time, I just thought, “Oh, it must just be menses.” I didn’t understand that it’s actually two distinct phases of the menstrual cycle. 

But I started to address things this way. Just to speed this story up and keep everyone on point, I’ll give you a simple analogy to understand estrogen and progesterone. I see them as what I describe as nonidentical twin sisters. They’re twin sisters, because they are 1,000% reliant on each other. They’re not identical because they do slightly different things. But like twin sisters, they need each other. In the first half of the menstrual cycle, estrogen is the sister that likes to get up early. She likes to attack life. She boosts serotonin and dopamine, which makes her very ambitious and self-assured. She’s rambunctious, she’s progressive, she goes out and wants to attack the world. She’s very entrepreneurial, she’s athletic. She also though can get in trouble sometimes. She can get a little bit ahead of herself. 

When progesterone wakes up along at ovulation, progesterone is the system that says, “Hey, calm down. Don’t get yourself in trouble.” She’s a little bit more conservative, she’s a little bit more worrier, she’s a little bit more like the mom, she’s a little bit more future thinking.” These two work together. If progesterone is not there, estrogen, it goes out of control and gets the metabolism in trouble. Progesterone reels her in, but if progesterone was all by itself, nothing would ever get done, because estrogen would suffer, so they need each other. By the way, from my perspective, if we’re going to understand female metabolism, women are the gender of childbearing and primarily the gender of child rearing. That’s changing now, but that’s been the historical aspect of woman which means their metabolism should be, if it’s smart, a little bit more sensitive and refined, and it is. Part of what estrogen does is make the system more insulin resistant and less stress reactive. Progesterone also helps with stress, but it does the opposite in terms of insulin. It makes the body more insulin resistant. People might say, “Well, why would progesterone do that?” Well, because progesterone is the sister that’s future thinking.” Remember, she thinks, “Hey, we just released an egg, we might have a baby coming, so maybe it’s smart to leave some extra glucose in the blood and some extra triglycerides in the blood to feed this baby that comes.” This is what’s going on month to month to month, these two sisters fluctuating. 

Now at perimenopause, the question you asked, what begins to happen is the follicle which becomes the corpus luteum, which is the source of progesterone, without that ovulation occurring, the woman sees no progesterone, so it’s almost like estrogen wakes up and progesterone is sick. She stays in bed, she can’t really get out and control estrogen. At this point in time, progesterone, which is a natural antianxiety hormone, and a natural antidiuretic hormone and also keeps estrogen under control, is no longer around all the time. Sometimes, it’s there, sometimes it’s not because sometimes the woman will ovulate, sometimes they won’t. What you’ll see is estrogen starts to throw temper tantrums. Sometimes, it’s very high, sometimes it’s very low. By the way, every woman who’s listening to this who has not gone through menopause yet or has not experienced perimenopause, you kind of know what this is like because every woman goes through a mini-menopause every time she menstruates, because you’ll see this happen as progesterone and estrogen fall off at the end of the cycle. You’ll see some of the telltale signs that you might be dealing with in menopause. As a matter of fact, I don’t know if you feel like this, Cynthia, when you’re working with your patients, but it’s fairly easy to predict someone who’s going to have a difficult time in perimenopause if they typically have a difficult time with premenstrual issues as well. You’re like, “This is probably going to be someone who struggles a little bit more in perimenopause.” 

At that period of time, stress becomes a major factor. I know I’m talking a lot, so I’ll shut up here in just a minute but here’s what’s really, really important to understand. If these two hormones another way to look at them is kind of like Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc wears a suit of armor, she has a shield, she also has a sword. Think of estrogen as the suit of armor, it helps against insulin, it helps against cortisol. Think of progesterone as the shield, it helps against cortisol, but doesn’t help with insulin. Think of testosterone as the sword. What happens is when the shield gets knocked out of Joan of Arc’s hand, when progesterone is gone, she is more now prone to stress. All of the things that she used to do that were not a problem, like cutting calories, and going for long runs, now can start to become a stress to the system. This is the first thing that women don’t understand. What they think is they need to be sort of the father figure who pushes and says, “We’ve got to push harder.” When really what they have to do is be the mother figure and start mothering estrogen a little bit and say, “You need to calm down, we need to take it easy. We need to not spend an extra hour on the treadmill, but maybe an extra hour in bed. We need to not go power walking, perhaps leisurely walking or leisurely walking in the woods. We need more sex and physical affection. We need more spa time. We need more creative pursuits. We need to take the stress off the system.” The women who are able to manage that are the women that have an easier time once they understand this. The women who keep trying to push the old model, “I’ve just got to go harder, harder, harder, more, longer, more intense,” they’re the ones that begin to suffer. 

The first rule here is that at menopause, this natural, beautiful stress-regulating system that women have built in, and it’s an advantage. In my opinion, the female metabolism has an advantage over the male metabolism in many ways, and we can talk about that. It’s an advantage. It’s not a problem. Once you understand it, once those hormones are not functioning the same way, your ability to tolerate stress the way you once did is now gone. Now, you have to start thinking consciously about that. That’s a big long sort of answer to your question. Hopefully, it gives context to what we want to talk about next. 

Cynthia Thurlow: No, I think it’s really critical. I wish I had heard that information 10 years ago. I think that far too many healthcare providers included, we don’t talk about the transitional shifts that occur at middle age and some people are hitting perimenopausal in late 30s, early 40s. Others it’s a little bit later. I love the analogies because that makes things so abundantly clear. One of the things that I found really fascinating as I was diving more into this work, when I literally hit perimenopause like a wall, was finding out that with these hormonal fluctuations, there are ways to exercise most effectively during each stage of your cycle. There are foods to focus on in each stage of your cycle. Of course, in more traditional like allopathic medicine, we don’t learn this. It’s not until we get a more functional approach that we recognize how critically important it is to change up what we’re doing. When we’re looking at estradiol, which is the predominant form of estrogen women are using prior to menopause, as opposed to estrone, which is a weaker estrogen and progesterone and testosterone. You touched on some of the things that we should be focused on, so that we are getting a little bit more hormone balancing. 

I agree with you that especially women in their 40s, in particular, when they’re heading into perimenopause, they start gaining a little bit of weight, they start having more trouble sleeping, they start restricting calories more, they start exercising harder, not smarter. They start doing the complete opposite of what they need to be doing to better support their hormones. I look at sometimes women running in my neighborhood, and they’re probably my age and some of them look so haggard, because they are, like you mentioned, running miles and miles and miles, thinking that’s going to be the way to get ahold of this weight gain, that pumps up their cortisol, it makes them more prone to insulin resistance, their sleep is probably terrible as well. 

What are some of the messages you give women as they’re making these transitions in terms of looking differently at exercise? You mentioned some of them, walking in nature, more oxytocin stimulation by connecting with others, having more sexual intercourse. What are some of the things that you do in the gym where you recommend for them to be doing based on their cycle versus when they’re in menopause? Let’s first talk about the women that are still cycling that are 35 to 40, and then the women that are in perimenopause, and maybe menopause, so the people have a better sense of, at 35, you can probably still do some CrossFit. At 40, you really should be ratcheting down on doing more restorative yoga to balance out some of the more intense exercise and then in menopause because I was humored the other day that a patient said to me, “Oh, my trainer said anyone north of 50 can’t do X, Y, and Z.” She had been working with this person for a long period of time. She said, “It’s not about limiting beliefs. He just kept saying to me that he has started to recognize that women don’t necessarily need to be working out harder, they need to be working out smarter.” I thought that was really very telling. 

Dr. Jade Teta: I would agree completely with a little bit of a caveat here. Part of I think what we need to understand is that just like women are not men, no, duh, we’ve been treating them like that. Young women are not the same as mature women, there’s a different hormonal reality. Each woman is uniquely different. The idea that women cannot train intensely, just because they’re a particular age, I think is a wrong idea. However, the right idea is that if you are doing the things you’ve always done and not getting results, it’s because you’re not doing the things you need to do. In other words, that people say all the time, “I’m doing everything right, and I’m not getting results.” What I say is, “Well, if you’re doing everything right and not getting results, then you’re not doing everything right.” What that means is your metabolic system has now shifted. 

Now you may be able to get away with some intense exercise, you may not. Rather than saying across the board, no woman should be doing these things, the SHMEC in check is what actually tells us. If you intermittent fast, let’s say and your SHMEC goes out of check, and you’re more likely to overeat for that day, because let’s face it, we now live in a reality where if you intermittent fast, and you have your first meal at breakfast, you can– one meal at a Cheesecake Factory tells, you can consume 3000-4000 calories in a sitting, and some people that fast, throw SHMEC out of check to the point where they actually end up overeating and raising their calories. For other women, that intermittent fasting actually keeps them in a calorie deficit and is not stressful for them. 

I don’t like this idea of saying this is stressful for all women just because women are a particular age. Your body does not speak– your metabolism doesn’t speak English, it speaks metabolism, and you need to understand how to speak metabolism. How do you understand that? You understand by these biofeedback signals. For example, I’ll give you a really interesting research study to drive this home. This was done on perimenopausal women and menopausal women. It’s just the group we’re talking about. Here’s what they did. They said, “We don’t want you to do anything consciously different with your diet. Keep eating your diet exactly the same. And then we’re going to have four groups. One group is going to do no exercise, the other group is going to do 30 minutes of jogging on a treadmill, five times per week. The next group is going to go 45 minutes five times per week, and the final group is going to do 60 minutes five times per week. Now, if the metabolism works the way we think it works, what would you expect? No change in diet, ramping up exercise, you would expect 60 minutes to be better than 45 minutes to be better than 30 minutes to be better than the control group. This is what we would expect. We would expect every group that exercised to lose some weight, because we typically think of metabolism is additive. “I burn some at rest, and then I add some on, I didn’t change my diet. I should now lose some weight.” 

Here’s what they showed. 25% of those women indeed lost weight due to these exercise regimes. These are the women whose SHMEC stayed in check. They could tolerate this intense exercise and they lost a little weight. It wasn’t overly stressful for the metabolism. What happened to the other 75%? 50% of those women was no change. Now, I don’t know about you all listening, but I hate to run. Imagine doing 60 minutes of workout five days a week and seeing no change whatsoever, that is ludicrous and agonizing, that amount. This is over 12 weeks. That’s a lot, a lot of treadmill action for no effect. Guess what happened to the other 25%? They actually gained fat. They actually gained weight. Now can you imagine, you go into this thing and you’re like, “I’m going to start working out,” and as a result of working out, you actually get fatter. This is the reality that nobody wants to address. 

When we think about Cynthia’s question, we have to first go what is causing this and what is actually causing it is a stress effect. Stress does not hit every female physiology the same because each woman is uniquely different. Just like your purpose is different, your physiology is different. You’re like a unique metabolic fingerprint. What you are doing is changing your physiology, changing sleep, hunger, mood, energy, cravings, exercise performance, exercise recovery, libido, digestion, signs and symptoms, all of these things. To know if what’s working for you is correct, you have to tap into this. Two things will happen with your exercise regime, if it is a successful and the right approach. SHMEC will be in check, and you will begin to optimize body composition. You will either maintain a good body composition if you’re there, or your body will start using fat to get into a more healthy body composition. You have to figure this out. 

Now, I’m not going to leave you with just with that. I’m going to actually give you what works for most women. I think this was the question, but I did want to first say it depends and give you a little nuanced answer, because that’s the real answer. If I were to say, okay– you’re like, “Jade, come on, I want to pin you down. What really should I be doing if I’m in this age bracket.” What I have found works the best for the majority of these women, for those 75% that don’t respond to the eat less, exercise more approach is a decrease in intensity and or frequency and/or duration of exercise. 

Moving, that’s number one, in other words, less exercise, not more, less intense, less frequent, shorter, that is one move you can make. So, you might say, “Well, Jade, can you give me specifics?” Okay, I’ll give you specifics. Three times per week, 30 minutes of intense exercise, followed by rest. What I call rest-based training. Push until you can’t, rest until you can. If you want to know a great thing to traditional rest-based exercises, is just traditional weight training. While you’re pushing weight, you get out of breath. Then, when you rest between sets, you recover. Three times per week, traditional fast-paced weight training. We now know the science says it’s just as good for your heart, it’s great for maintaining muscle and giving you that nice tone look, and it also will give you a little bit of an afterburn after the workout. Three of those per week, lots of walking. If you look at hunter-gatherer women, they’re covering between 10,000 and 15,000 steps per day, that’s about five to eight miles. That’s pretty easy to do. That’s about an hour to an hour and a half of walking for most women. That’s different than exercise, that’s getting out there and walking. It’s not power walking, it’s smelling the roses, it’s walking the dog, it’s hanging out with your significant other. It’s checking out the trees and watching the birds. It’s relaxing, it’s not stimulating. 

This then takes the stress off the system, so that your hunger and your cravings don’t unconsciously make you eat more, because here’s part of the thing that happens here. This is so, so critical. It really is, and I might get a little pushback from, Cynthia, on this, which will be just fine, because we’ll have a fun conversation about this, but it really is the case. Science is absolutely clear on this in my opinion that calories matter and they matter most. Here’s what happens in the research. Calories are not separate from hormones. This is the problem. They are the same thing. Calories equal hormones, hormones equal calories, quantity and quality or equal. Here’s what we do as humans, if I cut calories, or you cut calories, five days during the week, let’s say you cut by 200 calories. So, by the end of the five days, Monday through Friday, you have 1000 calorie deficit. But on the weekend, you overeat by 700 calories on Saturday and you overeat by 700 calories on Sunday. In your mind, you think you had a calorie deficit all week long, because you ate less five days versus two. Your metabolism doesn’t think in days, it thinks in weeks and months, it has no concept of time, it just goes what is the total calorie load. When you look across that week, just because you ate less five days and ate more two days, you actually are in a 400-calorie excess. Part of the reason some of these tools are powerful, is they cause you to not overeat. 

I love Cynthia’s work around intermittent fasting, one of the things I love about intermittent fasting is for many women, not all, what it does is makes things easier and just naturally creates a calorie deficit, but not all. We have to look at taking stress off the system. So, moderating the exercise, and then being very clear about calorie intake, realizing that quantity and quality are incredibly– are not different rather, but they’re the same. I want to hear what Cynthia thinks about these ideas. I couldn’t tell she was nodding or shaking her head, but to me, this is the way I see it. 

Cynthia Thurlow: We have to take a quick break and I’ll be right back. 

Okay, there’s a lot to say about what you were just discussing, not only just about backing off intensity of exercise, which I’m a huge proponent of good examples. I did super sets in the gym today, because I did drive my kids to school and I was like, “Okay, I only have this much time. We’re going to do super sets. I’m going to keep my heart rate up, and then I’m going to walk.” I’m a huge proponent of daily movement. I call it movement because getting out in nature, we know is highly therapeutic, my dogs[?] got a lot of exercise. On days like today, for example, it’s raining, I may get on my treadmill to get my 10,000 steps in. 

When we’re talking, and I know my listeners are going to want me to address this. I know that there are differing philosophies about calories versus macros. I tend to be more in the macros camp, because our body knows how to recognize breaking down protein into amino acids, breaking down fat into fatty acids, carbs into sugars, etc. I have never been a calorie counter per se. I think I always ensure that I’m eating for satiety, and that’s usually what I’m recommending for my patients that they’re eating for satiety, which is sometimes for many people a very differing philosophy than what we were trained. We were trained that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, you’re not eating for satiety, you’re eating every two to three hours to stoke your metabolism, to keep your metabolism humming. 

Respectfully, I think it’s just different philosophies from where we’re coming from. I always kind of go back to the macros piece that our body recognizes macros. I think calorie caloric density, when we’re looking at fat is a much more calorically dense, nine calories per gram versus protein, or carbohydrates, four calories per gram. Ironically, I was talking to my coaching group about this earlier this afternoon in preparation for this conversation. Just mentioning that I recognize there are different camps and different philosophies on this. What is your take on eating for satiety versus eating for caloric? If you’re looking at someone, if maybe someone’s working with you, and they’re like, “I’m stuck. How do I work through this?” You’re looking at what they’re eating, I know measuring food can be very beneficial, and I’m not discounting that at all, especially if someone’s stuck. What is your philosophy about marrying macros? I tend to be a full-fat, grass-fed person as opposed to low fat, non-fat, that’s definitely the different philosophy. I know some people in the training realm feel differently about that. 

Dr. Jade Teta: I actually think we are in very much alignment on this. I’ll expand on this a little bit, because to me, I don’t see them separate. I think it’s a mistake in my mind to see them as separate. I see, when you start talking about calories versus macros, I don’t see them as any different. Here’s the way I say it, calories are most important, but they don’t need to be counted. In other words, there’s lots and lots of ways that naturally take care of calories. For example, one of my favorite ways to naturally take care of calories with not counting anything is simply upping protein and fiber in the diet. They are incredibly satiating, as you say. Usually when you do that, almost always, you naturally accidentally decrease calories. What’s beautiful about that, by the way, anyway, is that we have no idea what our calorie levels are. Regardless of what anyone tells you, it is impossible for you to know on any given day, how many calories you actually need. 

The best approach is absolutely. When you say eating for satiety, that’s the whole concept of SHMEC. You’re eating to keep your SHMEC in check. Meals are not independent of one another. They are dependent on one another. What you eat or don’t eat for breakfast will directly influence how much you eat what you crave to eat for lunch, which directly influences dinner, which directly influences breakfast, whether you choose to have breakfast or not. And how you sleep impacts all of that. In my mind, they’re actually not different. 

There are many, many ways to do this, whether you’re doing intermittent fasting, whether you’re counting carbs, whether you’re counting protein, whether you’re focusing on fat, whether you’re doing this intuitively and just going by how you feel. In the end, if you get results, we know if you’re starting to lose fat, you’re in a calorie deficit. As a matter of fact, I would argue if you start with a calorie number, you’re putting yourself into a trap in a sense, because what you wrongly think that the metabolism is some definitive apparatus that just goes, “If I eat below this amount of calories, I’m going to get the results.” No, the metabolism is always fluctuating. It’s like more like a rubber band that’s kind of expanding and contracting. In a sense, the best thing to do in my mind, we really would like everyone to get to the point where they are being very intuitive in this process and not even thinking about calories. 

However, there are some people, and it’s not an insignificant amount, who are trying to do this from the intuitive perspective, and never getting results. With those individuals, I like to count. And actually, like you, I first start counting macros, and the reason I count macros over calories usually is because then I can control the satiating components of things. I can essentially say, “Let’s give you a little more protein and a little more fiber.” I’m also a very evidence-based guy, so I look at the research, but I think Cynthia brings up an incredible point we all have to be aware of here. Research is a tool for averages, it is not a tool for individuals. While we can know the research, for example, one thing that is 1,000% clear in the research, no debate whatsoever by anyone who studies metabolism. Fat is the least satiating macronutrient of all macronutrients. It’s just not debated anywhere in any serious metabolism. It’s debated in the blogs and the guru sphere and in books. To your point, there are a ton of people for who fat is the most satiating macronutrient. We cannot allow research and general rules to supersede what the individual metabolism needs and wants. I’m very much for, and I think if I’m hearing you correctly, we’re actually very much in alignment in this regard. From my perspective, I’m just not somebody who likes to set down firm rules, because I see that as soon as you do that, someone comes along and that doesn’t apply to their metabolic output. 

So, there’s many ways to skin the cat. One of the things I think that is very critical for us to know that Cynthia and I both, I think, work with is that when we’re talking this conversation about the male trainer, who is giving information to his female client, which by the way, that is 90% of the people who are paying trainers and paying coaches are women, and they’re mostly in that perimenopausal age range, we have to have an understanding of how these macronutrients, calories, quality, and quantity are impacting estrogen and progesterone and vice versa. If you don’t take that into account, you’re oftentimes losing the battle because you think it’s just diet and exercise. It’s not. There are four things that you need when we thought talk about the metabolism. I call them the four Ms. You need diet, yes. You need exercise. I call diet meals. I call exercise metabolics. That’s what everyone thinks. There’s two parts that are missing that no one knows about that we’ve already kind of addressed, and that is mindset, mindfulness, stress reducing and movement. I know Cynthia already mentioned those, but I just want to point them out that most people are simply doing two, diet and exercise. They’re not accounting for stress and movement. Those are arguably more important than the discussions about macros and calories and all of that, especially in this demographic. 

Cynthia Thurlow: Well, I think that’s really a beautiful explanation. I am pretty active on Twitter, and a lot of the gym bros there– I mean, there are battles. It’s like people want to die on the sword of calories versus macros. It’s almost every day. I think preemptively I’ve gotten– and I do agree that we’re in alignment on this. The quality counts, you can look at the research, it’s always an N of one. I always say that each one of us are individuals. What works for one woman or a man may not work for another, you really have to experiment. I think it’s really absolutely critical. I love that you use the term, the Goldilocks effect. When I was prepping for this interview, I was like, “Not too much, not too little, it has to be just right.” That really applies to each one of us that we have to do some degree of experimentation to find that sweet spot. 

One of the things that I appreciated when I was kind of prepping for this along with the SHMEC, which I thought was hilarious. When we’re talking about cravings, and we’re talking about, obviously, if someone’s having a lot of cravings, obviously, your SHMEC is not in check, there’s something going on that’s driving this. I think given the fact we’ve all been part of this global pandemic for the last year, there probably have been more cravings versus less. You make mention of how to find buffer versus trigger foods. Now I think this, again, goes back to what’s highly individual but two things that will mess people up terribly I have found with women are nuts and cheese. I’m curious with your patient population, are there specific foods that will drive the desire to eat more? Are there specific foods that people gravitate towards when their serotonin and dopamine are low? They can kind of give some clues that they need some more support, because this is an area that I’ve started becoming a little bit more interested in, given the fact, I think there’s a lot of information that’s out there, like, “Oh, when a woman’s premenstrual and she craves chocolates, because she needs magnesium.” Those kinds of things that’s beyond that, because obviously a little bit of chocolate is not going to hurt you, but some of these other cravings can be a sign of far more of what’s going on. 

Dr. Jade Teta: Well, the research is very, very clear on one type of food group we crave, all of us, men and women, and that research is very clear. The research on the idea that we crave certain foods because they crave certain nutrients, that may be true, but there is no scientific validity to that at all right now. From my perspective, I go, that is possible. I’m one of these people that goes, “Maybe.” I’m comfortable in the space of maybe, but right now, I would not say that’s a thing. 

You mentioned buffer and trigger foods, so let’s start with this there. To me, the buffering trigger food idea came out of this, this sort of acknowledgment of working with so many women and having stories like this. “Well, I had a bowl of berries and a little cup of yogurt for breakfast. Then, I had a salad for lunch. Then, I ended up eating a burrito and cheesecake and burgers for dinner.” They were this idea that some people had a salad, and from having a salad, it would make them eat worse later. Then there was this other idea that I saw some women would have like a few Hershey’s Kisses, and then be able to have a salad and eat healthy at dinner where they might have a wine with dinner and eat healthier as a result. You start seeing this, and you start saying, “Well, isn’t this interesting?” If I look just look at these foods independently, I can say, “This is healthy, this is not healthy.” But if I look at how they cause you to eat later, the whole trajectory changes. This is the idea when I came up with this idea of buffer foods and trigger foods. There’s certain foods that buffer against overeating and eating wrong things later, regardless of what they are. 

If Cynthia has three Hershey’s Kisses and it allows her to have a low-calorie, nutrient-dense, satiating dinner as a result of that, then I’m going to tell her to keep those Hershey’s Kisses in here. However, if she has a small little salad, and as a result of that, she’s creating burgers and pizza, I might say don’t have that salad. Unfortunately, in our industry, we are so focused on what– we love black and white thinking. A buffer food is any food, any food, regardless of what you think in terms of its health benefit that helps you eat better and less and more nutrient-dense layer. A trigger food is any food regardless of its health benefits that makes you eat more and worse. There are certain trigger foods that apply to most of us. Not all, but for most of us, these are these foods that are very clear in the research. They’re called high palatable foods. They hit the hedonic centers in the brain. They are typically rich in fat, sugar, starch, salt, and alcohol, and/or any of these. When you eat these things, they ping the appetite centers in the brain that say, “Ooh, that’s a high calorie food. Let’s get more of that.” This is a very ancient survival software system. 

By the way, this is a complete guess. it’s a hypothesis, but one of the things that I’ve seen with certain diets, like keto diets and other diets like that. Keto diet is a very singular flavor diet. It is a very savory, creamy texture. There’s not a lot else other than that. However, when people try to do stevias and high sweetened keto foods, what I’ve noticed is they get worse results, partly because they’re chasing their cravings all over the place. There was actually a study done back in the 60s, where I don’t know if you know the study simply, but it will be interesting, but people where they basically filled up a container like one of those thermoses. People couldn’t see what was in it. It was basically cream of rice, basically. No flavor, completely bland. They would drink this meal out of a straw, and they can have as much of it as they want, but only as meal. They basically were walking around in– it was in a hospital setting, very well controlled. What they found was that when you have a singular flavor, bland type food like that, you actually start not wanting to consume food and hunger starts to go away. These people had zero hunger, and were also walking around only consuming like 800 calories per day. Basically, this research has been picked back up of late and now we’re looking at the idea that certain flavors and intensity hits in varieties of food can ping our brain to want more. 

Some people know what this is like. You’re fantastic in teaching intermittent fasting. I love what you do in that realm. One of the things that I see with intermittent fasting is that some people once they start eating, they can’t stop eating. Delaying eating, these are these people who are these high ping people, they get that ping effect, and then they just start eating, eating, eating. For those people, intermittent fasting works fantastic, because it doesn’t trigger that sort of reaction. It’s the same thing when you end a diet, by the way. Most people do this cheat meal thing that they go out and get burgers and pizzas and these highly palatable foods and that’s why the cheat meal turns into a cheat month and a cheat couple of months. When you end a diet or any kind of thing, like this, you want to end it in a very bland sort of controlled sort of way. 

In terms of the question, I know I went around about but you said, are there certain things that can help. Chocolate is something that can help, especially women in this age bracket. It’s not because of the magnesium though because if it because of magnesium, you’d be craving clay, chalk, and greens because greens are packed with magnesium and have much more than chocolate. What you’re craving with chocolate is the sugar and the fat. But, also, chocolate has a anandamide and serotonin in it, phenylethylamine in it, theobromine in it. Basically, all these brain chemicals that make you feel good. 

Anandamide, which is a cannabinoid, they call chemical bliss that makes you feel wonderful. Take the fat out, take the sugar out, put cocoa powder in some water, stir it up, drink that. This will take cravings away. I actually built a whole product off this and it’s partly the reason that I sold my company with this success of this particular product. It’s especially beneficial around menses and perimenopause, because when estrogen and progesterone drop away, you have deficits in dopamine signaling, serotonin signaling, and GABA signaling. Well, guess what can bolster that? Anandamide for GABA, phenylethylamine for dopamine. 

Cocoa has actually preformed serotonin in it. Cocoa is a completely brain-stimulating thing for women. You just don’t want the chocolate. by the way, people always ask cacao or cocoa? Cacao is the raw bean, they smash that up, pulverize it, roast it, that’s cocoa. There is some indication that perhaps when you cook it a little bit and pulverize it, you get a little bit more of these bioactive compounds. Chocolate is when you take the cocoa fat and sugar and put it in that. We’re talking about cocoa powder or cacao beans here. 

Cynthia Thurlow: We’ll be right back. 

I think that is so incredibly interesting. We had a speaker on a few weeks ago, Dr. Glenn Livingston, and we were talking about how some people are able to intermittent fast, break their fast, eat a normal-sized meal and go about to their day. Some people break their fast, and then it’s a trigger to eat a voluminous amount of food. And then, they completely overeat, and then they’re not hungry at all. The working hypothesis was it was part of this feast-famine cycle. For some people, in their reptilian brain, it’s this survival mechanism. “I haven’t had access to food, now I have access to food. So, my brain wants me to eat all the food, all the things.” I think it’s really interesting how each one of us as individuals are able to kind of mitigate whether it’s a buffer or a trigger food, as you mentioned. I think that for many, many people if you are not consuming flour, sugar, alcohol, and I forget the other ones that you mentioned, how that can be problematic. 

I have found that for me, I’m generally existing in this very happy low-carb space. But I can’t have flours, even gluten-free flours. It’s like 1 cookie becomes 10. I was just saying now I give myself permission that I just don’t eat gluten-free products, and I do just fine. I can have a piece of chocolate, if I wanted to have a glass of wine, I could do that. I just find like it’s become for me at the stage of life that I’m in, I give myself permission to let go of these things. What are some of the strategies that you’ll use with your women? I love all these little mnemonics that you have. You’ve got the S’s, soup, salad, shakes with protein and fiber. What are some of the things that you encourage people irrespective of what philosophy they kind of find themselves in? I find nutritional dogma has gotten very polarizing, like people are either in the carnivore camp or they’re in the keto camp or they’re low carb or they’re paleo or they’re primal or they’re plant based, or whatever they’re in, and sometimes people don’t play well with others. It’s just the easiest way to put it when you get on social media. I think to myself, “Okay, if it works for you, and you’re not hurting yourself and you fast intermittently, and that works for you, that’s fantastic.” What are some of the strategies that you’ll use when people say to you like, “I really need to be thinking methodically about putting my meals together?”

Dr. Jade Teta: Well, I love that whole setup here because to me there’s only– I also, like you, I think maybe this is why you and I vibe. You seem to me a very sort of gray zone thinker, and so am. I don’t like the black and white. I am very individualistic in the way I look at things. To me, I’m program agnostic. Start wherever you want. To me, there’s only one rule in this whole game, and that is do what works for you. That’s the one rule to rule them all, like the one ring to rule them all? That’s the rule. Do what works for you. But that opens up, when I say that, everyone listening goes, “Okay, Jade, that’s fine for you to say, but how do I do that?” There’s actually a beautiful thing here on how you do that. You go like this, let’s say someone comes in to see me and they go, “I was reading about, I watched this documentary on blah, blah, blah, and I’m going to do this particular diet.” And I go, “Perfect.” 

Wherever you want to start, I don’t care, paleo, pescatarian, Mediterranean, keto, whatever you feel drawn to, I’m like, “Perfect, we will start there.” Because I know that my whole job is simply to teach you the language of metabolism and teach you to understand your body, so that you can build a program for you, by you, I can never know as much about your metabolism as you do. My job is to teach you. Then, I say, “If it’s going to work, we’ll know because your SHMEC will be in check.” By the way, when I say SHMEC in check, that means your hormones are in balance. It’s the same thing. We can talk about estrogen and progesterone and leptin and insulin and ghrelin and CCK and GIP and GLP, and all these things. If SHMEC is being controlled by these hormones, so SHMEC is in check, your hormones are in balance, and you’re losing fat, which tells us you’re in a calorie deficit, then you are doing what is right, regardless of what anyone tells you. I don’t care if you’re eating HoHos and bonbons and Twinkies and burritos, if that is causing three things, SHMEC to be in check, body fat to be attained or maintained and your vital blood labs, blood pressures, blood sugars and all that to optimize, then that’s the right diet for you, regardless of what I say. I think, Cynthia and I would argue that that’s going to be very rare that anyone on the planet is going to eat a diet like that and get those results. But if you did, I would say, “Go for it.” 

That’s the first thing that I say. Then from there, it’s becoming a metabolic detective. One of my heroes is Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee, the actor, the athlete, the philosopher. One of the things, I’ve read all his work, and one of my favorite quotes by him is, he developed his own system of martial arts, and he has a saying, and it goes like this, “Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.” When I work with a client, I’m like, “Yeah, let’s do keto, and let’s absorb what is useful, let’s discard what is not. Let’s add what is uniquely your own.” “Yes, now let’s do paleo. Let’s absorb what is useful. Let’s discard what is not. Let’s add what is uniquely your own.” Next thing you know, you’re doing paleo-you instead of paleo, and it’s becoming this idea that you are slowly, but surely emerging into an understanding of what works best for you. It’s not being a dieter, it’s being a metabolic detective. I’m all for it. Do every program that comes around, do every fad diet you want, so long as you are using the approach of absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own, so that as you go along, slowly but surely, you know fat works for you or doesn’t work for you. You know fasting works for you or doesn’t work for you. You know doing high-intensity stuff four times a week versus three times a week is not going to serve your body. And all of a sudden, you’re a lot like Cynthia and me. We’ve earned this through thousands and thousands and thousands of reps. We’ve been paying attention to our metabolism. I trust my metabolism. I know what works and what doesn’t. Doesn’t mean I always do it, but at least I’ve won half the battle. I know what works for me.

By the way, the other thing is, this is a process, not a protocol. Guess what happens with a process? Your metabolism is going to change. If you’re postpartum, it’s different than what it was before you had the baby. When you hit perimenopause, it will be different. Your metabolism is changing all of the time. With this process, you never have to diet again. You just rework the process. But if you’re a protocol person, and you need Cynthia and I to give you food lists and menu items and tell us exactly what to eat, what’s the macronutrients, what is it exact calories, tell me, tell me, tell me, then what you’re doing is you’re outsourcing to us what you should be learning yourself. To me, I am very much for all of these programs so long as you are learning growing and gaining wisdom around this. 

There’s an old Zen proverb, it goes like this. Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains, water is water, clouds are clouds, streams are streams. During the enlightenment process, mountains become something else, clouds become something else, streams become something else, and then after Enlightenment, mountains are mountains again, streams are streams again, clouds are clouds again. This is what we need to think about with food too. It’s basically this idea that before you ever diet or even thought about this, food was just food, beverage was just beverage. And then all of a sudden, you turn it into all this stuff toxic this and toxic that, and I can’t have this and I can’t have that and that’s bad and this is good. Then, afterwards you should be in a place where you just go, “This is just food. Some is useful for me, some is not. This is just beverage. Some is useful for me, some is not.” That’s our job. You can’t outsource it. 

Cynthia Thurlow: I think that’s really so beautifully stated, that intuitive connection with ourselves where we’re doing our N of one, experimentation for each one of us and might be very, very different. Now, it would be remiss if I didn’t at least touch on fasting a little bit more only because my listeners are going to want to know. Do you practice intermittent fasting, is it a strategy that you use with your own clients? Is it something that you keep in your back pocket if someone’s interested in trying it? What is your philosophy about fasting in women? Does it work well for them in terms of your clients? Have you seen it work well for them? Obviously, you know my answer. 

Dr. Jade Teta: Yeah. Well, one of the things that bothers me is this rhetoric going around right now that it does not work for women. I’ve seen it work incredibly, incredibly well for women. Again, we have to go back to this discussion about understanding metabolism, estrogen and progesterone at certain metabolic stages and understanding that these things don’t preclude intermittent fasting, they just basically put an asterisk there and say, “This is a woman who might not do well with this particular protocol.” 

Intermittent fasting, to me, it’s just like intense exercise, it causes you stress in some people, and when overdone, it can cause distress. What I mean by that it’s a hormetic challenge, which basically means, you do intermittent fasting, and if you do it the right way, and it’s not overdone in the right system, it actually helps your metabolism become more flexible and resilient and able to burn more sugar and burn more fat and be more reactive. The issue is that people will take this to the extreme like they will with anything. To me, we went through this, it’s very simple. People say, “How do I know intermittent fasting will work for me?” I simply say, “Does it keep your SHMEC in check or not? At the end of the day, at the end of the week, after intermittent fasting, did you also lose weight? Then it’s working for you.” When it stops doing that, then it’s no longer working for you. 

I have a funny case with myself, as a man. I was doing intermittent fasting back in the 90s, because that’s part– naturopathic medicine has been doing fasting for a very long time, it has always worked wonderfully for me. Then all of a sudden, around 40, I began to see blood sugars in the diabetic ranges when I was fasting, despite eating fine, and this was a key to me. By the way, my SHMEC was in check. Sometimes you got to get into sort of the biology. I now wear a CGM, and what I can see very clearly is if I don’t eat now, my blood sugars go into diabetic ranges. What is happening there is the mechanism of increased cortisol and adrenaline release causing my body to amplify, gluconeogenesis and release glycogen. This is not healthy for me to do this anymore. I used to do it for me, it no longer works for me in the same way that it once did. 

This is something that we have to sort of, in my mind, understand. This is one of the most powerful tools that we have in the nutritional realm. It has been with us since the dawn of man. It is incredibly powerful. We now are in the modern age, and everyone is uniquely different in their psychology, their physiology, their personal preferences, and their practical circumstances. We can’t apply a tool like this to everyone. The idea of saying that it doesn’t work for women, to me, is just ludicrous. I’ve seen it work incredibly well for women at all stages of their life. I’ve seen it backfire tremendously on plenty of women. It has to be done in an individual basis. 

Cynthia Thurlow: I really agree. I love that you yourself have utilized this as a strategy, you determine that at one point it worked and at another point it didn’t. I remind people that there are specific times in our lives that may not work well, and that’s why it’s so important to be attuned to your own body, your own physiology, how you feel, how you view the world, all absolutely critical. 

Well, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I will absolutely have to have you back again. I know, there was a long list of questions, we got through most of them, but I’d love to have you back. How can listeners connect with you? Tell us about what you’re working on. 

Dr. Jade Teta: Yes, you guys can contact me– unfortunately or fortunately, I live a lot of my life on Instagram. I’m @jadeteta on Instagram, social media. I teach there, I do answer DMs. I have a ton of those but I do try to get to all of them. So, just give me a chance it might take up to four weeks for me to get to you, but I do clear them out. So, DM me for sure. Check me out at jadeteta.com. I have my own podcast called The Next Level Human podcast where I do self-development and metabolism. I call it Mind, Muscle, and Metabolism. My latest work right now is two things mainly. I’m just finishing up my what eighth book called Next Level Metabolism that goes through a lot of what Cynthia and I just discussed. I also launched what I believe to be the first of its kind a certification specifically geared to advance metabolism and the female hormonal system. 

Unfortunately, and I do think this is unfortunate, I’m a guy. I’ve never had a menstrual cycle and I’m not going to go through menopause, but yet, a lot of people are paying attention to this understanding that I have about female metabolism. I think that’s too bad and I want to train more professionals, especially women. I know Cynthia does an amazing job with this work, but we need more of them. I took it upon myself to go ahead and create a certification to get professionals up to speed on some of the discussion we had. 

Cynthia Thurlow: I have to let our listeners know, I’ve been watching your puppy [laughs] while we’ve been recording. I’ve been watching your puppy drag your shoes around. 

Dr. Jade Teta: I’ve been watching her too. She’s keeping me busy. Let’s put it that way. 

Cynthia Thurlow: Yes, she’s definitely keeping you busy. Thank you. We’ll have to bring you back again. 

Dr. Jade Teta: Thank you so much for your work, Cynthia.